IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA (original) (raw)
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This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institutionalise 'national memory' in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective 'national' memory. In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (UPN, The Nation's Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro Studium totalitních re^mü (USTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slovaks. Both Institutes were supposed to deal with the period that began in the late 1930s and ended in the late 1980s when, with the exception of 1939 to 1945, Czechs and Slovaks were living in a common state with their lives heavily affected initially by the German occupation and the Second World War, and later by Soviet dominance and the Cold War. The key moments that the impact these two periods had on the life of the Czechs and Slovaks under Nazism and Communism became what the German historian Jörn Rüsen calls 'borderline events' (Rüsen 2001, 232-253). Due to the traumatic nature of these events for the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the fact that these changes could not be explained within already existing and previously dominating historical narratives, it is possible to classify them as 'catastrophic events' that made searching for a new sense of history and creating new historical narratives inevitable (Rüsen 2004, 46; Cavalli 2008, 169-182). Even though the vast majority of the Czechoslovak society saw the change from Communism to a pluralistic system as positive, the process of creating new post-Communist narratives was far from easy (Kopecek 2008, 232-264; Koláf and Kopecek 2007, 173-248). Public debates surrounding the Slovak UPN and Czech USTR clearly illustrated these problems. This shared history has made the UPN and the USTR special in the post-Communist part of Europe. Institutes of National Memory were also established in some other countries of the former Soviet Bloc, such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. None of these, however, were as closely connected by the shared past they were about to study as the Czech and the Slovak institutes. Similar subjects of study and similar characteristics of work do not necessarily mean that UPN and USTR became mirror images of each other. Different perceptions of traumatic history in the Czech and Slovak republics and different development in these two successor states of the former Czechoslovakia turned these seemingly very similar institutes into two institutions with different priorities and even with partly different functions in their societies. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that while the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firsdy as moral and scientific, UPN and USTR became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of collective 'national' memory. …
2020
I n the first decade of the 2000s, a wave of qualitatively new anti-communist politics of memory resulted in a specific “upsurge of memory” in Czech history education . Various remembrance agents started to influence history education with the goal of turning schools into an area where Czech society could continue the process of dealing with the troubled communist past. Using new methods and media, such as emotional TV documentaries and debates with eyewitnesses of communist repression, civic society initiatives got involved in negotiating the public consensus over the question of how to teach and remember the history of state socialism. The author examines the context and consequences of this discourse of dealing with the past for history education, especially in the way this remembrance activism utilises the totalitarian paradigm. It is evident that the mobilisation of remembrance to serve present day citizenship objectives has resulted in recent controversies, as teachers had...
Dealing with the communist past was one of the constitutive elements of the new or reborn democracies in East Central Europe after 1989. 'Coming to terms with the communist past' was especially important as a means of securing the legitimacy of new democratic regimes. In Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic respectively, as elsewhere in East Central Europe, I suggest that we can divide the quarter of a century since the end of communism into two distinct periods. In the period from the democratic revolution to the mid-1990s, the 'quest for legitimacy' of the new order and efforts to weaken nomenclature old boy networks shaped how the politics of history was organized. In the second period, from the last years of the century onwards, with the legitimacy of the political system basically stabilized, the communist past increasingly became a field of political struggle with distinct variants of politics of memory being used as expedient political tools. The most visible of these was the activist anti-communist memory politics, which strove to repair and recreate the 'memory of the nation'.
Central European Papers
The totalitarian theory, which essentially treats Stalinism and Nazism (in a wider variant Communism and Fascism) as equally evil regimes, or at best, fundamentally the same arch-enemies of democracy, has been challenged by the so called revisionist school in the Anglo-American academy already from the 1980s. The theory, however, experiences a new Renaissance in the Eastern and East-Central European postsocialist countries, where it is used to de-legitimate and criminalize the state socialist past. The paper examines the politics of memory and the impact of new theoretical currents on the Holocaust research in the two selected countries, Hungary and Slovakia. We argue that while Holocaust was effectively silenced in the official discourse under the state socialist era, after 1989 there have been considerable efforts to integrate the tragic chapter of the Holocaust in the national historical consciousness. However, in the far right-wing discourses the Holocaust and the responsibility of the local elites for the persecution and deportation of the Jews is often relativized if not denied. We can illustrate this point with a Hungarian example. Recent historical studies demonstrated that in World War II (WWII) the Hungarian army, which was sent to the territory of today's Ukraine to exercise military control over the occupied territories, participated in the mass murder of the local Jews and the terrorization of the population. These studies and documentation triggered a fierce debate among historians, who argued that the documentation was based on Soviet "falsification" and it is an attack against Hungarian national consciousness and other scholars, who claimed that the clarification of the past should be part of the national historical consciousness. The paper introduces some major historical debates in Hungary and Slovakia, which illustrate the ideological and political struggle between the supporters of the neo-totalitarian paradigm and the "revisionists" (who seek to go beyond the totalitarian simplifications). The latter also advocate the respect of the sources-with the opening of the archives the documents are accessible to any interested researchers and there have been extensive oral history projects conducted in the region. Diaries, letters and other ego documents can also help the work of a committed historian. Indeed, with the opening of the archives Memory and politics: "totalitarian" and "revisionist" approaches to the study of the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia ARTICLES Eszter BARTHA Slávka OTČENÁŠOVÁ "revisionists" prefer to speak of a new era, which they call post-totalitarian, indicating the end of Cold War propaganda-on both sides. However, it seems that the former "East" (still) remains a terrain of ideological debates. In the paper we demonstrate how the contested ideological terrain of the interpretation of "Communism" is linked to the rise of a new anti-Semitism in both Hungary and Slovakia. In order to combat with this, it is essential to go beyond national sensitivities and national traumas (which is often translated as 'we have suffered a lot, too') and understand our common history from a global point of view.
Historical Memory and Counter-memory of the Second World War in Slovakia
Problems of World History
In the Slovak Republic (SR), after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia and the collapse of ČSFR in 1993, the problem of creating a national narrative of historical memory, in particular about the Second World War, as one of the important elements of the transformation of Slovak society and systemic post-communist transformations in the young state, became more urgent. The article deals with the official version of preserving and popularizing the historical memory of the Second World War in the Slovak Republic, the main state institution for the implementation of which is the Institute of National Remembrance established in 2002, as well as various interpretations by Slovak historians and politicians of such key events of the Second World War as the history of the Slovak state in 1939-1944, the Hungarian-Slovak “Little War” in March 1939, the participation of Slovak military units in the war on the Eastern Front, the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, the Holocaust. Variou...
Historical Memory Research in Slovakia
Acta Poloniae Historica, 2012
To properly pursue the research into the concept of historical memory, it is necessary to refl ect on the micro-historical approach and the concepts of historical anthropology. The research on historical memory is still a relative novelty in Slovakia, where, compared to the other countries, it does not have a long tradition behind it. We could say that, from the present perspective, it has already been twenty years since Slovak researchers were fi rst confronted with its basic theses; however, the tradition of historical memory studies is very young. The aim of this study is to outline when and how the theme of historical memory became part of scientifi c works in Slovakia, and what its intellectual contribution has been. 1 I INSTITUTIONALISATION OF THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY RESEARCH After the fall of the socialist regime, the social sciences in Slovakia were confronted with new tasks. Apart from other things, it was expected that they would critically refl ect the communist regime and that they would catch up with the European scholarship. 2 Professional Slovak historiography became institutionalised relatively late, after 1 Partial results of my research were published in Alica Kurhajcová, 'Teórie, metódy a interpretácia pojmov národná identita, verejný priestor a pamäť: Oslava 90. výročia narodenia Lajosa Kossutha',
The late 2000s in the Czech Republic saw a trend of increased interest in the archival document as a means of historical authentication. This chapter examines two parallel developments of this preoccupation on the discursive level and analyses their occasional intersections: in public debate and in cultural representations. With the establishment of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů; ÚSTR) in 2007, an institution dedicated to examining the archives of the Security Services during the Nazi occupation and the period of Communist Party rule, 1 the topic of the archive reanimated public debate. As was the case in the 1990s, when various memory activists took it upon themselves to publically disclose names of alleged former secret police collaborators, thus tarnishing the reputation of a number of people, 2 information emerging from the institute sparked discussions on the supposed collaboration of several prominent public figures with the communist secret services.
European Papers, 2020
The legal governance of historical memory in Eastern and Central Europe has grown ex-ponentially over the past two decades. This development runs parallel to the region’s reckoning with its communist legacies at the national level, where national identity has been harnessed and sometimes instrumentalised to adopt revisionist interpretations of the past. Mnemonic govern-ance in these States has also been heavily influenced by their proximity or membership to the Eu-ropean Union, which upholds the rule of law as a fundamental value. At the same time, the re-gion’s Soviet legacies have been projected by a newfound Russian assertiveness in the area, which has resulted in a phenomena known as memory wars. Those developments are accompanying the ongoing process of democratic transition in Eastern and Central European States. This introductory Article sets out the premises of the Special Section on historical memory in post-Communist Europe and the rule of law, by showing that these democratization processes are far from linear. It does so by first outlining the trajectory of memory governance in Western Europe, which has focused on the Holocaust as a foundational European narrative. It then outlines the tensions emerging be-tween this account and the historical specificities of post-communist States which experienced dif-ferent forms of totalitarianism. Finally, the introduction shows that the embrace of the rule of law in post-communist Europe in the form of the European Union project, transitional justice or demo-cratic values has also been at odds with the region’s mnemonic governance.
In this essay I track the challenge for today's European memory regime, focused upon the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I argue that the political elites of the new Eastern European member states have acted as primary drivers of change by urging the European Union to take a firmer stance towards the memory of communism in Europe by establishing communism as a similar evil than Nazism. In the context of the "Eastern challenge", the memory politics formula looks as follows: it is the communist memory that has shape the politics of Eastern Europe, but the politics of Eastern Europe that shape the memory of Europe as a whole.